How to See the Dharma in Western Literary Classics with Dean Sluyter

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Dean Slider, an award winning author who has taught meditation since nineteen seventy from maximum security prisons to the Guatemalan rainforest. Is a student of Eastern and Western sages in several traditions and has completed numerous pilgrimage and retreats in India, Tibet, Nepal, and the West. Dean's latest book is The Dharma Bum's Guide

to Western Literature, Fighting Nirvana in the Classics. It reflects his lifelong exploration of the awakening process, as well as his years as a prep school English teacher. I love this quote from the Buddha. The mind hard to control flighty a lighting where it wishes one does well to

tame the disciplined mind brings happiness. Happiness can often feel like an elusive goal everyone seems to strive for and never quite achieves, because we seek it outside of ourselves rather than going inward, which is something mindfulness teaches us to do. And Jenny, yes, Eric, this idea of taming the mind is why you named your program The Well Trained Mind, right yep. And I'm excited to announce that

it's open for enrollment now through October eight. In my live virtual six week Introduction to Mindfulness program, whether you're new to mindfulness and meditation, or you're looking to strengthen your existing mindfulness practice, I'll teach you the foundations of mindfulness so that you can live with more ease, create a nourishing and fulfilling spiritual practice. Discover how to be a friend to yourself and strengthen your ability to live

in a more grounded, connected, peaceful way. To learn more about the program, go to one you feed dot net slash mindfulness. That's one you feed dot net slash mindfulness before October eight. I hope to meet you there. Hi Dean, Welcome back. Hi Eric, it's great to be back. Thanks so much. Yeah, it is a pleasure to be talking with you again. I don't remember when we talked the first time, but it's been several years at least, so

it's good to have you back. You have a new book out that The minute I saw the title, I was like, oh, I absolutely have to read this one. It's called The Dharma Bums Guide to Western Literature, Finding Nirvana in the Classics, which is right up my alley. We'll talk all about it here in a moment, but let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside

of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well.

It's an interesting question because in some ways that all seemed a lot clearer when I was younger. You know, I was held bent for leather on the spiritual path from very early on. The feeling was, Okay, the stuff I want to feed is the spiritual stuff, and the one I want to not feed is the worldly stuff.

And to a large degree, what this whole path has been about for me is finding out that well, there really is no separation, that you have to find this spirit right here in the world, and fortunately the world. Just as all the colors of the spectrum are expressions of white light, everything in the world, everything in the manifest universe, is in fact the expression of being this spirit. Brahman,

now God, whatever completely inadequate word works for you. Yeah, yeah, It makes me think of a section in the book. I'll describe the book briefly. There's lots of different chapters about Western classics you read where we're told to read in high school, and we're going to go into that.

But what you just said made me think of a line from the chapter about J. D. Salinger, where you said, immature seekers operate only on the principle that the Kingdom of Heaven is inside us, per the Gospel of Luke. But mature seekers know, per the Gospel of Thomas, that the kingdom is both inside and outside us, that the grace of Nirvana embraces everything we thought was the enemy of grace. Yep, yep, there it is there. It is so much for that dumb parable. I need to rename

this ship. Yeah, it really is. In a way. It's you know, dual is m right there, and the true truth, the highest truth, turns out to be non dual. It does. But the thing is, you have to learn that in your bone. It's not enough to get that philosophically or intellectually. You have to get it experientially. And the most direct way to do that, I mean what I do seven

days a week is teach meditation. I guide meditation, and let me say this early on while we're here, I lead actually usually three times a week free zoom sessions anyone can join, come to my website and love to have y'all aboard. The essential misconception that people have about meditation is it's about blocking out stuff that should not be there, thoughts, anxiety, boredom, restlessness, the sound of the dog barking across the street, and disfavoring all of that

and favoring something. It's the spirituality, the God, the boundlessness, And the main thing that I have to show them that I was fortunate enough to learn from my teachers is no, you open up your pores to everything. You don't try to block a thing out. Turns out that any effort to create a non agitated state of mind is a form of agitation. Hello, as the catch twenty two of trying to meditate. You know you were just

reading from my chapter on J. D. Sallenger. That's really what Holden Caulfield eventually has to learn in the Catcher and the Rye. He's trying to run away from the so called phony materialistic world. You know, he keeps making up all these these fantasies about what the alternative will be. Says I'll go out west and get a job in a gas station and pretend to be one of those deaf mutes so I don't have to have stupid conversations

with people. It's a very adolescent approach, and for a lot of people, you know, the spiritual path becomes a way to just prolong adolescence and finding out how to make spirituality mature. You know. Finally, in my advanced stage, I'm I'm starting to get a handle on that. I'm curious though, I often this question about the idea of spiritual practice being about not trying, just sort of sitting back and not trying. And I hear this come from a lot of very wise spiritual teachers who I admire,

and I recognize an absolute certain wisdom in it. The question I have, though, is that those teachers almost always did try for a period of time on working to you know, meditate in more of a way where they were working to perhaps focus the mind, to develop concentration. And I sometimes wonder if it's not a little bit like this is the analogy I've heard someone else use, Barry Bond saying, well, you never need batting practice, right, Well,

when you're five, you probably do. And so I'm kind of curious from your perspective, do you think that all the effort you did put in for a long time was sort of not needed and you could have just gone right to not trying, or was there a period of time where there was some degree of effort that was valuable. I did not spend a lot of time putting in effort because I was way too lazy for that.

I mean I did start off. I mean I started off as a Zen student, right, you know, and I was supposed to sit motionless, and I was so supposed to make my mind motionless. And you know, they patrol the joint with a stick, and if they detect that you're stirring in body or mind, they whack you across the back of the shoulders with a stick. And I got about three days into it when I knew, no, this is not going to work for me. My body is way too twitchy and and my mind is way

too twitchy. Now, if I had stayed with Zen practice later on, I learned through my reading, I would have gotten to what they call in Zen sikn taza, which means just sitting, sitting, not doing anything. Yeah, but I knew that I was not going to be able to get there that way. I was not going to be able to get to the soft through the herd, as it sometimes put. And it turns out that what that was saying about me was that I was like regular.

I was a regular person. And even the Zen teachers will say Zen is not for most people, it's for like one percent of people. It turns out I was in And so I very quickly found teachers who said, you know this idea that you have to put in a lot of effort to get to effortlessness. It takes some skill, some delicacy, some precision of instruction to go straight to the effortlessness. If it's instructed with that precision,

it can be done. I feel I can say that with some authority now fifty years later, because I've taught thousands of people in that way. You know, in my thirty three years of teaching high school, all my students got exposed to meditation. Fifteen year olds, twitchy, fifteen year olds, They could all do it. The ones who took up them a little longer to get it were the valedictorians,

because they were used to overthinking things. The ones who got it away were the jocks, interesting right, because they were used to experiencing things directly, somatically physically, not running everything through the brain. How did the juvenile delinquents do? That would have been my category. I'm just curious how I would have done well. As a matter of fact, after some years, I started to feel kind of morally compromised.

I was working at this very ritzy prep school. I had the Johnson and Johnson kids and the Si new House kids, and Governor Kane's kids and and all that and some more, you know, aspiring upper middle class, you know, immigrant families from Hong Kong and Pakistan with you know, to doctor parents and so forth. But essentially I was working for the rich folks. And that, plus some memories from my hippie days when I briefly got thrown into the slammer a couple of times, I felt very motivated

to teach in prison. So I got myself a volunteer gig down the road at Northern State Prison in Newark, New Jersey, which is considered the roughest and the worst run prison in New Jersey. And I was going there every Thursday, night. So I was going from these kids who were on their way to you know, Harvard and Yale and Brown and Dartmouth, to a lot of guys who would never learned to read and write. And they

were also able to get it right away. They are the best people to work with because they get the seriousness of the situation. They're not fooling around. The Buddhist said, practice like your hair is on fire. Actually all of our hair is on fire. But but you know, if we have the comforts of middle class life, were able to distract ourselves from that fact for for several years and until it becomes a cute. But I want to

look back to something. The way you first pose this question about is just sitting back, and there was sort of an implication that a lot of people have that, Oh, not making effort means not having commitment and not practicing with regularity. That's a different thing. That's a different thing. I mean, eventually it gets the idea of practice, you know,

that's provisional. That's as the Buddhist said, you take the raft across the raging river of the allusion to the far shore of enlightenment where you discover, actually it's the shore you were on all the time but didn't recognize. But at that point, then you you don't carry the raft around on your back. That's one thing. The penalty of carrying the raft too long is okay, you know, maybe you get a little backache. The penalty of jettisoning

the raft too early is you drown. Yeah, so you hang on too practice And what I tell people is practice long and easy. Got it. So what we're talking about here when we say non effort, is we're actually

talking about when you're practicing. Yes, I think Audya Shanti might have been one of your teachers because he said to me once because I was asking a little bit about this question and sort of talking about will you know, and he said, the purpose of will is to get you to sit down I practice and at that point it becomes completely counterproductive. At that point you have to let go of the trying. And I think that's what

you're saying, absolutely that trying to meditate. Oh I'm going to try to calm my mind down all of that. It's like looking at the surface of the ocean and going, oh, the ocean is choppy. I need a paddle and I've got a bam bam bam, bam bam. Flatten out all these waves. That doesn't work. It's a game of whack a mole. There's always more waves, and actually you're just stirring up the water worse, you're creating more turbulence. So

what you do is you let gravity take over. The mind is always trying to gravitate towards joy, peace, boundlessness, nirvana. If you just allow gravity to take over, you sink a couple of feet below the surface of the ocean, and do you discovered it doesn't matter what's going on on the surface. Underneath the water is silent and has been all at along. See, the mistake is trying to silence the mind. The mind is the faculty of thinking.

It's supposed to be generating thoughts. Just like the eye is supposed to be seeing colors that you're supposed to be hearing sounds. The mind is supposed to be thinking thoughts. It's a matter of mixing up mind and awareness. Awareness by nature is always silent, as mind by nature is

always busy, So it does take some guidance. It's it's it's something more than just hearing me saying these words, At least for a couple of times, you know, someone taking you by the hand and oh yeah, and gravity really does take over and we we sink down into awareness itself, which is even if is going on, that's

up there someplace that doesn't matter. I don't want to spend too much time on the minutia of meditation, but I'm going to ask one follow on question, and I'm going to share a little bit about how I practice. The place I want to be is what you're describing, which is just let it all be and just let

it all happen and just open boundless awareness. What I often find, though, is that that open boundless awareness sometimes starts to look exactly like my day to day life, which is basically one thought after another that I am

following around. And in those cases, what I will do is I will narrow my aperture briefly to something like bodily sensations or the breath or the sounds around me, and I'll allow that to stabilize a little bit, and then I'll kind of let the aperture kind of back out to the wide full thing from what you teach in the perspective you talk about, is that a useful way or not that's a workable strategy, and it's a

strategy with a lot of historical precedent. Where I've gotten to in my own practice, and the way I teach is simpler and I think more direct than that, okay, because that still involves a certain amount of judgment. Oh now I've decided that what's going on here is not satisfactory. Yeah.

So the way that I practice, in the way that I teach, is when you realize you've glommed onto something, whether you're following this you know, this whole thought story, or whether you are resisting something, which is another form of hanging on, right, And that's important to understand because if I decide, okay, I don't want to be hanging onto this. I want to get rid of this, so let me push it away. You see, pushing away is just a sneaky, quote unquote spiritual way of hanging on.

So what I teach people and what I do, is when you realize you've golombed onto something, you're engaged with it, you're wrestling with in any way, relax your grip. Period, relax your grip on it. Now, once you relax your grip on it, naturally gravity takes over and you're settling back down into the self, into boundless awareness. Whatever it was you were gripping may continue to be there in time, it's going to drop away, but that doesn't matter. That's

none of your business. This phrase that's gotten very popular in meditation and in spirituality generally, which is let go. And I used to say that a lot. But what I realized is people here let go, and they think the thing, whether it's the thoughts and meditation or the trauma you're dealing without a meditation, they think let go means it's supposed to go away. And you'll hear people say, well, I'm trying to let go, but I can't see that's

a contradiction. That's not really letting go. It's hanging onto the expectation that it's supposed to go away. So I've stopped saying let go. I say relax your grip. Once you relax your grip, now either mind is open to three hundred sixty degree boundlessness and whatever continues to be there is fine. I think that phrase relax your grip is a great one. Let it be is another alternative. Yeah, if you're gonna say let it go, you have to follow it up with let it be that takes the

poison out of it. Now. I want to get to the book because it's fantastic. I'm just going to read a couple of things that you wrote. In time. I began to see the connection between this awakening and the books and poems I loved, between the islends and the words. There are, of course, many powerful awakening books from the East. I'm skipping them all instead. I want to look through the Dharma eye and find the one light in the

most familiar Western literature. I love that talk to me about Well, the title of the book is is sort of intro into this space, oh Western writer. Also, my introduction to Buddhism came through this book. Came through the Dharma bumps. Dharma bumps, all right, Caro X, Dharma bumps,

right right right. I guess I was just giving you an opportunity to talk a little bit about what caused you to kind of really want to dig into Western literature right as a way of illuminating the infinite versus just relying on the sort of literature that talks about that more directly. So, really, this came out of my experience of working at my one and my first and last grown up day job, which was teaching English at

this New Jersey prep school for thirty three years. And meanwhile, you know, very seriously contin and youing and my meditation practice, my spiritual explorations and reading and hanging out with different teachers and and so forth, and running off to India and to bat every chance that I got, and then you know, coming back in the fall once again, I'm teaching Huckleberry Finn. Once again, I'm teaching the Great Catsby.

Once again, I'm teaching Emily Dickinson. And you know, if you're halfway awake, you know, in the regular way, if you're not just mailing it in, you know, coming back year after year teaching largely the same works, there's a tendency to get deeper into them, see things that you missed. And especially stumbling back from hanging out in the temples and with the Llamas in Tibet and so forth, I was like, oh, wait a minute, these dots are starting to connect. Also, I should mention that one of my

early teachers was Maharishi Mihashiogi. When I've talked about finding effortless meditation early, my my first version of effortless meditation was transcendental meditation, which I learned from from Maharishi, and I became a teacher of TM. And in nine seventy three he founded a university, Maharishi International University, the only college as far as I know, whose initials pose the school's essential question, am I you? And so I was there at the beginning. I was a teaching assistant. I

was in the master's degree program in interdisciplinary studies. And Marishi's whole premise for this founding this school was, Okay, we're going to teach all the traditional disciplines physics, chemistry, literature and so forth in the light of enlightenment. And

that was the brilliant thing. And and in fact I wrote for my final paper for my master's degree program, the paper on Enlightenment in the Movies, just maybe ten page paper, something which many years later I expanded became my book Cinema Nirvana Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies, where I take on you know, Casablanca and The God other and deliberately I took on films that you would never think of as being spiritual or having anything to do

with enlightenment. So I was kind of put in that direction, largely by Marsh. You know, later I had to walk away from TM and the TM organization because I started getting weird in various ways. And you know, was delighted to discover that, Oh, Marsh, she does not have a monopoly on effortless meditation, and I can practice this in places without the weird politics and finances of the organization. You say that to this point, if the infinite is infinite,

there can't be anywhere it isn't. So again, you used a bunch of different words, Tao or Brahman or God or you know, all these things. If that light is there, it's in everything, and so how do we find it? And I think that's one of your gifts is finding it in the very common things that a lot of people overlook, like the movies or the books. The commoner

the better, the funkier the better. One of the high points of my life was one morning at breakfast, reading the side panel of a carton of Tropicana orange juice and discovering that it had the perfect, concise, complete meditation instruction. Do you remember what they were, Oh, of course, and it said quote nothing added, nothing taken away, not from

concentrate indeed, indeed, that's great, that's funny. Yeah. Well you also quote a line from Parliament or Funkadelic, Free your ass in your mind will follow, and you said, although often it's the other way around. Yes, yes, up, and it's the other way around. I think that's in my chapter on the Transcendentalists, which I had a jolly time writing, going into Emerson and Henry David Thorough and that whole crew.

I mean, if I had a time machine and I could go back and visit and be a fly on the wall, the first two places as I would go would be the Globe Theater in the time of Shakespeare and Conquered Massachusetts in the eighteen forties, and the times of the Transcendentalist. Everything that we think of as alternative lifestyles, and of of devoting one's life to some kind of awakening rather than just making money, and the importing of the so called Eastern ideas and finding how to apply

them in Western life. All that really germinates with that crew of eccentrics in eighteen forties and conquered. Yeah. I share a birthday with Mr Emerson, obviously not the same year, otherwise I would be the miracle of this conversation correct, So I've always felt an affinity towards him. And Emerson talked about the over soul, and he said, that's his plain American name for Brahmin, the transcendent beingness of the

universe he'd read about in the Hindu texts. Yeah, you know, and he did a wonderful job of kind of translating this into plain American in a theoretical way. And then his protege, Henry David Thorow, was the one who really decided, well,

I want to put this in practice. You know, everyone reads Walden or reads excerpts from Walden in high school or in you know, English, one on one in college or something, and I think a lot of people miss the gist of it, which is that this was his version of being assad who the wandering holy men that you see in in India who have checked out of the regular making a living marriage, all of that and

just get up in the morning. And Yeah, there's the oneness with nature that's you know, very important in thorough but more than that, there's the oneness with our own nature, with the deepest nature, the nature of being. This as

you know, I quote in the book. He gives this one descriptions about half a page or something of just sitting in his doorway and not realizing that he's gone from the morning until midday, until suddenly he hears some sound kind of startles him, and he talks about as he's sitting there, the birds flying through his cabin, flying

in and out of the doors. And I realized that that's a metaphor for exactly the openness, the non selective openness and meditation we were talking about before, that you just let yourself be like a house with all its doors and windows wide open, just let everything blow through. I think that's a Suzuki quote something around like let thoughts come in the front door and go right out the back door. When you're just talking about the row

there and going to Walden. That made me think of Karo Wak And I don't remember which book this was in, maybe it's in Dharma Bumbs, but it's always stuck with me. Where he went somewhere like his job was to be like the forest overlook, you know, and he was basically like out in the middle of nowhere. That's Dharma Bums. Gary Snyder, who's called Jaffie writer in the book introduces them to that you can get a gig as a fire lookout. Yeah. Yeah, I've always thought that would be amazing.

It's interesting because my introduction to Buddhism, as I said, two things came together at the same time. One was I had a high school science teacher who introduced me to Zen Buddhism. I don't know why he thought I would want to know this, but he did. And then around the same time, I was getting into Karouac and stumbled into the Dharma bumps and it sort of all

came together. Now, from there I pursued the downward excesses of karo Wac for the next number of years, not the meditative aspects of Karoak that certainly was my opening. Let's change directions to another Western classic that I don't think you taught in your prep school, but we'll be familiar to all our listeners, which is the cat in the hat? Right, where is the infinite and the dharma in the cat in the hat? You know he's a

zen prankster, right. It's interesting. The premise of the book, the presenting problem, as a therapist would say, is that these two kids are bored. It's a rainy day, they can't go outside in place, so they're bored. They're just sitting looking out the window at the rain and being bored. Sally and I the narrators, the boy and his sister Sally. So it's interesting that it starts with sitting. And all we could do was sit, sit, sit, sit, And we

did not like it, not one little bit. You know, this is what we're saying before about about showing up for your meditation practice. You know, I'm sure a lot of the monks who were there practicing with the Buddha. Just because they lived two thousand years ago and war robes doesn't mean that they were a different kind of people. They were Oh, man, are we really gonna sit? Sit? Sits it again? And in fact it was in the rainy season. And I talked about this in the chapter.

The whole tradition of spiritual retreat, of meditation retreat, of people being together as opposed to just solitary you know, ascetics practicing out in the jungle that was started by the buddhup because he started to have so many disciples with him as they wandered from village to village that they couldn't go during the rainy season in northern India,

that's monsoon and it's hard to travel. And also then if you walk across the rice fields while they're flooded with rain, you destroy the rice and you destroy the livelihood of the local people. So during the rainy season, they'd find some caves or abandoned you know, house or building or something, and they would they would have their retreat, they would do deep meditation. So there's that lovely parallel right there. And and what happens. You get bored now

at the same time. This is the mid fifties. You know, I was in the first grade. I had to include the book because this is the book that made me fall in love with reading. Dr Seuss said his proudest achievement was getting the Dick and Jane books out of the schools. Dick and Jane books, see Dick Run, Dick Can Run, Run, Dick Run. It was like, just kill me now. So it's this suburban home. The kids have been left home alone. By the way, back in those

days happened all the time. We were all left home alone. We would go out and play unsupervised. That was a different time. And the kids are sitting there and there's this really fascinating picture of them sitting. It's a double page spread, and at the far end, on the reader's left, there's Sally and I looking up in shock from their seats by the window as the door is flung open

and uninvited. The cat, leaning back like keep on trucking right, leaning back with his eyes closed, just con strides uninvited with a big confidence smile, into the house. He's gonna mix things up. You know, you're having your house turned upside down? Right, your worldview. You think you've got it all figured out, you know, what's what, You've got your nice middle class life. Then along comes, you know, in

your case, Eric, along came Karroac. Caroac was your cat in the right and for a while, it creates chaos, right, and you followed all the karo Ax words. Fortunately you had the good sense to know when to stop with that, which Karoac did not. You know, Caroac just died, a miserable, nasty alcoholic. So here comes this element of chaos, and

it's gonna turn everything upside down. Now. In the book, I reproduced this painting that I fell in love with when I was in Rome, which is Carravaggio's calling of St. Matthew, and the layout is exactly like this picture from the Cat in the Hat. Over here on the viewers left here is these five tax collectors and tax collectors in the days of Jesus. They were like the local mafia thugs. They were there to, you know, shake you down for

however much money they can get out of you. And they worked on commission, so they were not beloved people. Jesus was reviled for hanging out with the tax collectors and the prostitutes. So they're they're sitting there at this table counting their take. That's their apple cart. Everything's fine. Everything right over here on the right, they've just come through the door, just like the Cat in the Hat is Jesus, and he's got St. Peter along with him.

And by the way, all the tax collectors are dressed in contemporary dress and Carravaggio's time, Jesus and and St. Peter they're in robes and sandals, so they're coming out of a different dimension. And there's this there's this just tractor beam of divine light pouring through the door with them and Levi, the guy who's about to become Saint.

Matthew is looking up and Jesus is pointing to him, and you know, and it says in the story, he said, out of those guys, he somehow knew the same way that your science teacher knew he saw And I, as a former high school teacher, I know how he knew you had this spark in your eye. Every year I would see it in a couple of kids. Right. So so Jesus in the same way knows he out of those five guys, he points to Matthew and he says, follow me. And Matthew was going, who me? Are you

talking to me? And so it's this archetypal situation when that thing comes into your life. And it's interesting because it's with one hand he's still hanging onto his money. The one hand is still on the table hanging on to his money. So that's the moment, the moment of decision. Am I going to plunge into this world of opening? I loved reading that chapter. You also talk about thing one and thing too. So most people I think who are listening cat in the hats pretty pervasive in in

Western culture. So but Thing one and thing to the cat basically unleashes and they are an extra level of mayhem making. And you say, in our own lives, there's always a thing one and a thing to tearing things up, the pairs of opposites, playing bad tricks on us, loss and gain, pleasure and pain, fame and shame, ambition and sloth. The list goes on. I won't keep reading all of it,

but I love that idea. It's always been one of my favorite teachings from Buddhism is that idea of like the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows, Like that's life, you know. We all have our thing one and thing too. Yeah, and again that's the duality. As long as we're viewing the world in dualistic terms, we're

screwed one way or another, you know. And when you see whole religions or the way people have in my view, misinterpreted religions in dualistic terms, where okay, there's the this you know, fight going between the two wolves, or between right sin and virtue, and ultimately that always gets projected onto other people and it becomes the good people versus the bad people, and someone always winds up getting hurt or killed. We've used the term multiple times, dualism, nondualism.

We should probably define some of these things for people who are less familiar with that terminology. Pick either one of them, dualism or non dualism, you know, come at it whichever direction you want. But right, well, dualism is the way the world appears to us when it's filtered through the thinking mind. Right, it appears that, oh, there's I and you, there's self and other. It seems very clear to me that I am the self and you Eric,

You're you're another, You're just you're another person. If we start to break it down to look at it a little bit interesting, eight billion people on the planet, seven billion million are other. One of them is self. Somehow I got elected, I got a golden ticket. I got to be the one who is this center, right, the center of the universe, the one whose joy and sorrow matters, right,

the one who's pain and pleasure matters. Right. You know, I could say it matters, and I feel like I should feel like it matters, But it really doesn't matter as much to me whether you have a toothache as it matters to me that I have a toothache. So what happens in our explorations, our practice, our spiritual inquiry, whatever you want to call it is we start examining

this notion of self and other. And you know, in Tibetan practice, there's a lot of exercises where you give the golden ticket of selfhood to the other person and you take on the ticket of being just one of the eight billion others. And it turns out, oh, you can feel it this right. Oh, it's such a relief. It's a lot of work being the self being this this construct. And you can bring this, by the way, into daily life. Like you're sitting at the red light

and you're running late. You're frustrated because the light is red. You're stuck in the pain, in the suffering of the red light. But if a momentarily, what if I give the golden ticket of selfhood to all the people who are going on the cross street, then I can just, oh, just share with them the joy of having the green light. And this is showing how the suffering really is a self created thing, and it comes from being stuck in this dualistic worldview where I am the self and everything

else is not the self. That's the dualism of subject and object. Closely related to that is the dualism of the seeker and the goal. I the self am seeking and somewhere there's this goal, there's this nirvana, there's this having this boundlessness. In a way, this is the easiest place to get at first us in meditation, that distinction, that sense of an eye, which is a you know, this little ego neatly sewn into a bag of skin, you know, kind of melts away and there's just awareness,

And am I resting in the awareness? Or am I resting as the awareness? You know? That all kind of melts that duality. There isn't one thing resting in the other thing. And more and more you start to live, you start to experience that there's only this one ocean of existence. You know. Over here it rises up as a Dean wave, and over there it rises up as an Eric wave. And we can wave to each other in all these fun ways and interact, but it's it's

really the ocean waving to itself. Back to the cat in the hat for a minute, I just simply cannot let this go by without mentioning it, which is you invite us to take a long look at the cover of the cat in the hat, and I have to say this was a deeply pleasurable experience for me. The way you walk through it. We don't have time to do at all, but I am going to point out the beginning of it. You say, here we see the cat's formal, almost presidential portrait ready to go on a

dollar bill or maybe a three dollar bill. He gazes out us in three quarters profile with what has been described as a smile you might find on the Mona Lisa after her first martini. That made my day. Everything you do from there on, still analyzing the cat, is absolutely brilliant. Nicole, who helps with the show, sent me over. She said, I want to make sure you've got this.

You sent me an image, you know, high res image of the front of the book, so I could I could go through the activity right good, the Mona Lisa after having a martini. That's beautiful. Yeah, as I say, that's what someone else said, I wish I wish I'd

thought of that. I wish I had to. Yeah, yeah, But what I was able to bring to the table there was the fact that you know, I've been with a wonderful teacher, Charles Janu, who actually the book is dedicated to who's this wonderful Buddhist teacher from Switzerland and a world recognized expert on iconography. You know, when you look at any image, like the image of Ganesh there on my altar, every detail, the fact that his trunk, whether it's turning to the right or to the left,

that all is saying something. And it's not that I expect someone to waltz through my front door with an elephant head. But that's all telling the story of awakening, of enlightenment, various aspects of it. So Charles walked us through all these temples and showed, Okay, this Buddha, you know, is wearing a purple undershirt, and that signifies this was

this one's wearing a red undershirt. That signifies that. So I took that same approach of iconography and applied it to the cat and the hat, looking at every detail, which also that made me alert to the fact that of the seven dwarfs, five of them have brown eyes, dopey, the holy, innocent, the child, because to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven you have to be like a little child, has baby blues, grumpy. Who is the aspect of us that is resisting resisting the light has little tiny dots.

He doesn't have pupils. He literally can't let the light in. Fascinating. Well, I have blue eyes, so maybe maybe maybe there's hope. Certainly plenty of people are gonna be like, yeah, he's dopey. We got that right. All right, Let's jump around to a couple other books. JD. Salinger. We sort of touched on this one a little bit. There's another section that I wanted to hit on, which I thought was great. Was your talking about in some of his post Catcher

in Their Eye work. He's speaking through Buddy Glass and the family resident writer says, please accept for me this unpretentious bouquet of very early blooming parentheses. And you say that that bouquet may well be Salinger's model of the human mind, which is pros aspires to reproduce thought within thought, within thought within thought, at the inmost core of which is a perfect fragrant emptiness. And I just love that because isn't that the mind thought within thought, within thought

within thought. But the key thing is at the center of it is the fragrant emptiness. That's the awareness which is always silent, invisible, in substantial, intangible, boundless and it's fragrant. You know, this is in Hindu philosophy where they say, you know, sut is chit is a nanda being. This is awareness, is happiness, and that's why the mind is

attracted to it. My old teacher Marushi used to say that we're like a guide as the sun is rising, a thirsty man trying to sip all the little dew drops off the blades of grass before the sun rises and makes them all evaporate. And then one day you turn around and you discover all along there's been this vast reservoir right behind you. All right, So we've been trying to get these little drops of joy and happiness, peace stability from all the different things in our environment.

And the problem is they don't cooperate. They don't hold still. You know, your adorable little kittens become cats. You know, your favorite restaurant they change chefs, your favorite shirt turns into a dust drag. You know, the Buddhist teaching of impermanence, it's all going away all the time. And also it can give us great joy sometimes, but it's finite joy. Only the infinite can give us infinite joy. And you know that's the bad news. The good news is tag

your ip. Yeah. In the section on the Great Gatsby, you say, the belief that someone else has a special essence that we lack perpetuates our sense of incompleteness, and then identifying the light with any external thing is dangerous, not only because we might not get the thing, but because we might then we'll find out that having can't

match the grandness of our yearning. And I find that statement so true that, like, some people never get the thing that they think will make them happy, and that's a constant frustration. Other people get the thing that they think will make them happy and doesn't work. Or I think the part that's tricky as it works for just a little while. If it didn't work at all, it would be so easy to see through the illusion. You'd be like, ah, this stuff doesn't work at all. But

it does. It's temporarily, temporarily like I feel really good, this is great, and then it's gone. It's every Christmas morning of your childhood. Mommy, Mommy, please buy me the g I Joe. I'll never ask for anything else again. If I can only have the g I Joe, that will be it it. And you know, and that it. The implicit assumption is it's the one thing that will make me so happy my head will explode like the ultimate orgasm, and then I'll never be capable of desiring

another thing again. And it really seems like it for fifteen minutes, and then then onto the next thing, onto the next thing. And it's because awareness is infinite and we're trying to fill it up with finite things. The only thing that can fill up infinite awareness is itself. That's why meditation is important, because that's where awareness rests in itself and is able to plumb its own infinitude. So early on in the book, you say that the

stage is taught, and I've gradually confirmed what happens. If we keep opening to the light of being, we can deal gracefully with all life's noise and business on the outside. Wall on the inside were silent and crystal clear is an empty mirror. So I want to ask a question a little bit about kind of what we've been talking about. We were just talking about the nature of desire. It replicates itself, right, and we know from the way biology

sort of has us wired. We're wired that way. You know, we're wired to not eat once and be sufficiently full forever, because we wouldn't survive that way. Right. So you've got this biology going on that does seem to promote a certain dissatisfaction, a certain wanting and craving that that seems wired into us. And then there's this infinity that we are part of, that we are how do the two work together in reality? So, say you've grasped the infinite,

you've got some sense of this? Is it simply in the same way in meditation, you watch thoughts come up, you watch them go The same thing is starting to happen with desire. You watch it come up. You still feel it because you're a human being, you've got that, but you're able to watch it come up and watch it go away. I'm just kind of curious, like in your own life, Like how does that show up in work? Yeah?

You know a lot of people when they read the teachings and they read that, oh, this whole root of suffering has to do with desire, I think it's more misunderstood than understood, and they think that, oh, therefore, so the way to awakening is to try to suppress my desires, right, or if they think, oh, this means I can never have sex again, or I can never enjoy a good meal again. Then they get well and I'm sorry, it's not for me. That's not what it means. As I

understand it. There's what is, and then there's what the thinking mind superimposes on top of what is. There's this spiritual cliche I'm sure you're familiar with. There's a lot of truth to it. Pain is mandatory, suffering as optional. You know, the fact that we've got these carbon based bodies means that we're you know, especially as we get older,

somethings start to hurt, some things, you know. But then the mind, the way the mind hangs onto the stuff, spin stories around it, runs it through this echo chamber, and that's the suffering. Even in the law, you know, you sue for pain and suffering, that it recognizes their two different things. Now, in a similar way, there's the biologically rooted desires and then there's the way the mind runs them through the echo chamber and creates all this

drama around your sexual stuff and your eatings. It's very interesting to be on a silent meditation retreat, which I recommend everyone get a chance to do at least once in your life, whether it's a weekend or you know, I've done that for sometimes, you know, a month or more at a time, and it's great. You sit there and it's like your one break from stuff is getting the meal, and you think, oh, this is my one

great chance for distraction. And you're sitting there in the mess hall and looking around at all the other silent people, like like cows on the hill, chewing their cud. And what I often would find was that I would take the normal amount of food I would usually take, and I couldn't finish it because for once I was actually paying attention to the act of eating instead of being all caught up in conversation, which you know, in regular life, and I'm not on retreat, I do all the time.

I do with you know, my wife, for friends. It's delightful, it's great, but it's also a very valuable experience to just be eating and realizing that if you pay attention, I should write a diet book. This is right. This is the thing I do all the time when not on retreat. After every forkful or spoonful of food, I put the utensil down because otherwise, you know, you see people they shovel it in, and they're not tasting what they're eating because they're like covering with the utensil, getting

ready to take the next bite. So when we do this and we're able to start kind of taking the mind and its carelessness and all that out of the equation and really experience and really enjoy, paradoxically, we wind up much less haut up and having to have more and more and more. Let's pivot to another book, which

is Huckleberry Finn. You really bring up kindness a lot in that chapter, So let's explore the idea of kindness through the lens of Huckleberry Finn maybe to start, and then more broadly, in that chapter, I do a lot of drawing the parallels between huck Finn's journey and the journey of Gotama on his way to becoming the Buddha. You know, in both cases they had kind of two

false models that they had to escape from. Right in the case of the Buddha, first he was being raised as a prince or something having every luxury, and then he realized that that life of gratifying, the sense of self indulgence, that was not it. So he went to the other extreme being an ascetic in the forest and supposedly living on one grain of rice a day. Then

realized that wasn't it. And the key moment for him is a moment of kindness where this village girl, Sujata supposedly met him on this spot on the river which I've been to. There's a little shrine there. It's very sweet, and she offered him a simple plate of kind of this rice pudding meal, simple nourishing, and he accepted it. And his buddies, his fellow ascetics, this guy's off the

program and they abandoned him. And then that moment of accepting that act of kindness, it's accepting human nous, the humanists, that's not this extreme or that extreme. Then he's ready to sit down under the Bodhi tree and do his final meditation and awaken. So kindness is really the catalyst now. In the same way, huck Finn has the two extremes, which conveniently Mark Twain puts on the two banks of

the Mississippi River. On the one bank, he's being raised by the widow Douglas, who's trying to adopt him and make him wear starchy clothes and go to school and say prayers and all that, and it's too restrictive, right, too tight. Then his pap, his horrible, drunkard, bigot father, violent, awful person, kidnaps him and takes him to a little shanty on the on the other bank of the river where it's just chaos and violence, and he almost kills Hawk while he's drunk. So Huck's got to escape again

from the two extremes. What does he do? He goes down the middle, he gets into the river, and there's this one bit if I can read this, please because it's just just about my favorite thing, just about my favorite discovery that went into this whole book. So this is when he's just escaped from PAP's cabin and and he's got this canoe that he's salvaged. I didn't lose no time. The next minute I was a spinning down stream,

soft but quick, in the shade of the bank. By the way, if you want to learn how to write, read Mark Twain out loud. His sense of the music of sentences is just unparalleled. I got out amongst the driftwood and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine, I never knowed it before.

That's so beautiful. And then I write, this is about as clear a baptism in the transcendent as anyone has ever written. After the hectic scramble to get clear of pap Huck, let's go lying on his back in a posture of utter passivity. He gives up rowing and steering, allows the boat to merge anonymously with the mass of drifting timbers and basques in the moonlight. This is how to meditate. Let her float, and the result is a vision of unobstructed boundlessness. The sky looks ever so deep. Yeah,

that's wonderful. I love it. Did Mark Twain have any sense of the parallels there with the Buddha and the and the two banks or do you just think it? No, and it doesn't make it any less real. I'm just

curious whether he was exposed. Yeah. And I made a point, and I say this in the introduction to the book, that some of the authors that I treat did have a conscious overt explicit connection, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Thorough, the great lesser known Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great frustrated Catholic priest who was writing ecstatic love poems to God. So for them it was explicit, but most of them

it's implicit. Dr Seuss was not thinking about Zan Prankster's I Can pretty was not thinking about Carravaggio and the calling of St. Matthew. To me, it's much more fun in a sense when it's not deliberate, because then that gives me more to do. There's more of a game to play. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're going to have a post show conversation where we're going to talk about a great chapter that brings together the Star Spangled Banner, Mr.

Rogers and Respect by Aretha Franklin. But before we do that in the post show conversation, I do want to hit just the very end of it so that everybody can get it. And you say that as you're talking about Respect by Aretha Franklin, you talk about the idea of respectate book again, Relook, look again, look back. Respect. Yeah, share a little bit about that, because this is a beautiful way to wrap up the book. Yeah, you know, all the great teachers, all the stages tell us we're here,

We're walking around in nirvana. Right at the end of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the earth, and people don't see it, you know, And I like to imagine Jesus follows up by going, go figure, all right, how do they not

see it? And you know, you may have experienced this, Eric when you've come out of a really good meditation, and sometimes you know, famously people when they kind of take the shortcut to something at least somewhat resembling awakening, you know, through psychedelics, they're like, oh, how did I miss it? There's no additional experience I need. I somehow missed that the world as I've been experiencing it. This is it. The Buddha said, how wonderful, How wonderful all

things are enlightenment, just as they are. Right. It's like, it's the Homer Simpson moment that how did we miss it? It's respectate re look look again, what did I miss? Because I was wrapped up in an idea of this.

This is just a cup of tea. This is not the infinite, you know, and that takes us all the way back to the very beginning of the book, where William Blake says, you know, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, you know, like just you know, take a grain of sand or a flower, or your hand itself, anything, look at it long enough, and that your ideas about it, that oh, this is just this thing, this is not

the infinite, starts to melt away. Yeah, I'm gonna read uh sentence or two that I think is so beautiful. You don't see God smiling at you through the eyes of your child, or your dog, your ex or your unfavorite politician. Look again, you don't see boundless, invisible love, silently laughing through each moment, even as you frantically try to change the flat tire on your way to the job interview. Look again, meanwhile, look at yourself and your

fellow beans. And if you don't yet see us all as the same one, pure light, just assume it for now and treat everyone accordingly. That's so beautiful. That's pretty good. Did I write that? You did? You did? And then you quote to take it back to the title of the book, Koac, where so much of this thing for you and I has a meaning? Is Kroac said, all is well, practice kindness. Heaven is nigh simple. That's Jack is best. That is well. Dean, thank you so much

for coming on. You and I will continue in the post show conversation for a few minutes. Listeners. If you'd like access to the post show conversation as well as all kinds of other great things, go to one you feed dot net slash join and we will have links in the show notes to Dean and all of his work as well and to your zoom sessions. So thank you Dean. It's been such a pleasure to have you

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